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By Root 6770 0

Walter deduced that he must still be on board. Richard who didn’t believe in a fucking thing! The only imaginable explanation was that Patty had talked to him on the phone and guilted him into sticking with the program. And the idea of those two talking about anything at all, even for five minutes, and specifically talking about how to spare “poor Walter” (oh, that phrase of hers, that abominable phrase) and save his pet project, as some kind of consolation prize, made him sick with weakness and corruption and compromise and littleness. It came between him and Lalitha as well. Their lovemaking, though daily and protracted, was shadowed by his sense that she’d betrayed him with Richard, too, a little bit, and so did not become more personal in the way he’d hoped it might. Everywhere he turned, there was Richard.

Equally unsettling, in a different way, was the problem of LBI. Joey, at their dinner together, with moving expenditure of humility and self-reproach, had explained the sordid business deal he’d been involved with, and the key villain, as Walter saw it, was LBI. Kenny Bartles was clearly one of those daredevil clowns, a bush-league sociopath who would end up in jail or in Congress soon enough. The Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd, whatever the fetor of their motives for invading Iraq, surely still would have preferred to receive usable truck parts instead of the Paraguayan trash that Joey had delivered. And Joey himself, though he should have known better than to get involved with Bartles, had convinced Walter that he’d only followed through for Connie’s sake; his loyalty to her, his terrible remorse, and his general bravery (he was twenty years old!) were all to his credit. The responsible party, therefore—the one with both full knowledge of the scam and the authority to approve it—was LBI. Walter hadn’t heard of the vice president whom Joey had spoken to, the one who’d threatened him with a lawsuit, but the guy undoubtedly worked right down the hall from the buddy of Vin Haven who’d agreed to locate a body-armor plant in West Virginia. Joey had asked Walter, at dinner, what he thought he should do. Blow the whistle? Or just give away his profits to some charity for disabled veterans, and go back to school? Walter had promised to think about it over the weekend, but the weekend had not, to put it mildly, proved conducive to calm moral reflection. Not until he was facing the journalists on Monday morning, painting LBI as an outstanding pro-environment corporate partner, had the degree of his own implication hit him.

He tried, now, to separate his own interests—the fact that, if the son of the Trust’s executive director took his ugly story to the media, Vin Haven might well fire him and LBI might even renege on its West Virginia agreement—from what was best for Joey. However arrogantly and greedily Joey had behaved, it seemed very harsh to ask a twenty-year-old kid with problematic parents to take full moral responsibility and endure a public smearing, maybe even prosecution. And yet Walter was aware that the advice he therefore wanted to give Joey—“Donate your profits to charity, move on with your life”—was highly beneficial to himself and to the Trust. He wanted to ask Lalitha for guidance, but he’d promised Joey not to tell a soul, and so he called Joey and said he was still thinking about it, and would he and Connie like to join him for dinner on his birthday next week?

“Definitely,” Joey said.

“I also need to tell you,” Walter said, “that your mother and I have separated. It’s a hard thing to tell you, but it happened on Sunday. She’s moved out for a while, and we’re not sure what’s going to happen next.”

“Yep,” Joey said.

Yep? Walter frowned. “Did you understand what I just said?”

“Yep. She already told me.”

“Right. Of course. How not. And did she—”

“Yep. She told me a lot. Too much information, as always.”

“So you understand my—”

“Yep.”

“And you’re still OK with having dinner on my birthday?”

“Yep. We’ll definitely be there.”

“Well, thank you, Joey. I love you for that. I love you for a lot of things.”